Ever since PAX, 2K Games has been getting tons of advertising for Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth by letting various YouTubers and media outlets broadcast their first 100 turns through the game. Many of these "first 100 turns" videos have been popping up lately, but this newest one from The Solar Gamer, which you can watch below, is focusing on a pacifistic, expansionist attitude.
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The goal for this playthrough, he explains early in the video, is to show growth and expansion. To this end, he picks the African Union as his sponsor to gain Barre's unique ability of increasing growth while his civ is healthy. He also chose settings during the game's opening Seeding that added to his civ's growth.
Finally, he focuses on gaining culture early on to make his way down the Prosperity Virtue tree, which gives him plenty of bonuses to growth and health.
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One useful takeaway from this pacifistic playthrough is the importance of defending civilian units when they're exploring or settling. Alien units crawl all over the world map, and they occasionally seem to be able to appear out of nowhere. As this YouTuber found out, these alien units can very easily snatch a defenseless settler, halting expansion and wasting however much production you had spent on that unit.
Founding a new city in Beyond Earth seems to work a bit differently than in previous games as well. A new settlement only has the ability to work one adjacent hex when it is first founded and slowly expands to the remaining five hexes over the course of a few turns. It's important, then, to defend a new settlement while it gets on its feet. Each new settlement also seems to come with a free military unit to help a civ's army from becoming stretched out as a civ expands.
The video also goes into the trading mechanic in Beyond Earth. Trading seems to be a more strategic affair than it was in Civ V: Brave New World. Trading convoys can't go through miasma, the poisonous alien material that pervades the planets, so civs either have to be proactive in clearing it out or be clever enough to find alternate routes to important destinations. It also looks like the trade units can be given a new task after each trade expedition, unlike trade units in Civ V that would follow the same trade route for a set number of turns. Developing good relations with the alien trading posts that crop up across the planet is critical, too, as it's a good way to keep resources flowing in your civilization.
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth is set to release for PCs on October 24.
